China today successfully placed what it labeled as “two test satellites” into orbit using its smallsat Kuaizhou-1A rocket.
No information at all was released about both satellites.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
40 SpaceX
35 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 55 to 35 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 55 to 53.
An evening pause: Performed live 1977.
Hat tip Tom Wilson.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on July 10, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the floor of 4-mile-wide Avire Crater, located at about 41 degrees south latitude inside the much larger 185-mile wide Newton Crater.
This picture was taken as part of a long term monitoring program of the many gullies that flow down the slopes of the crater’s interior rim. In fact, the gullies of this crater have so interested scientists that one even proposed [pdf] this location as a potential future rover landing site.
Avire Crater, a small … gullied crater within Newton Crater, provides many aspects ideal to a future rover mission. It has been previously hypothesized to be the location of a former paleolake with multiple episodes of ponding and deposition. Gullies occur almost continuously on the southwest wall clockwise to the northeastern wall. Dark-toned dunes are present in the northern portion of the crater, in some places obscuring gullies while cut by gullies in others. No changes in the extent or appearance of the dunes have been observed since they were first imaged … in January of 2000. The dunes lack superimposed craters, indicating that the gullies that cut through them are geologically very youthful. Layered lobate features are present at the base of the gullies on the northern wall, seen in many other craters on Mars (not always in association with gullies), which have been suggested to have formed as terminal moraines of ice-rich flows; in Avire, these features have also been suggested to be paleolake deposits. The crater floor is obscured by mid-latitude “fill” material, hypothesized to be partially comprised of ice based on morphologic evidence that the material has been partially removed.
As gullies, dunes, and “fill” material occur in many places on Mars, a single rover mission to a site containing these features would provide valuable information applicable to thousands of other locations across the planet.
The curved ridgeline in the crater floor is thought to be a moraine. The “fill” material to the south is essentially glacial in nature. Both, as well as the gullies, appear to have been shaped either a paleolake that once existed in the crater or by cyclical glacier activity. By going to this one crater, scientists could study all these different geological features at one time.
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They’re coming for you next: Ron Hittle, who had served as a firefighter in Stockton, California, for more than two decades and was for five years its fire chief, was fired in 2010 because he had had the nerve to attend a leadership conference that happened to be affiliated with the Christian religion.
More than a decade ago, the Deputy City Manager asked Chief Hittle to attend leadership training. Chief Hittle learned about the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit from a business magazine, and he decided to attend because it was a renowned leadership seminar that featured a “pop up business school” with stellar speakers from various backgrounds including his own Christian worldview. Chief Hittle invited three of his staff members who shared his Christian faith to join him, and he put his attendance on the public city calendar so his supervisors would be aware. The firefighters paid for the two-day seminar with their own funds.
But the same supervisor who asked Chief Hittle to attend leadership training told him it was unacceptable that he attended a Christian-affiliated seminar.
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All courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
The rocket has been delayed since 2020 due to serious engine issues.
The module, dubbed Mentian, is scheduled of an October launch. We shall then once again have to watch helplessly as the core stage of the 5B rocket crashes uncontrolled somewhere on Earth. In related news:
It remains unclear whether that rocket’s core stage engines will restartable and thus able to control its de-orbit so that it lands in the ocean harmlessly.
We don’t know for sure, as the company has said nothing and this information is based solely on orbital photos taken between August 26th and August 28th.
This university does a lot of aerospace military development for China, such as hypersonic missiles. Also, considering that China has itself hacked into American aerospace resources frequently, such as at JPL, this accusation is simply the kettle calling the pan black.
The event is virtual, apparently open to the public, will include researchers from NASA, JAXA, and ESA, and will be focused on discussing methods for protecting the planet from big asteroid impacts.
India’s space agency ISRO on September 3, 2022 successfully used a suborbital sounding rocket to test a prototype of an inflatable airbag, which it dubs an Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (IAD), that can inflate at the top of a 1st stage and slow and control its descent back to Earth after launch.
The graphic to the right was adapted from the mission brochure [pdf]. According to ISRO:
The IAD was initially folded and kept inside the payload bay of the rocket. At around 84 km altitude, the IAD was inflated and it descended through atmosphere with the payload part of sounding rocket. The pneumatic system for inflation was developed by LPSC. The IAD has systematically reduced the velocity of the payload through aerodynamic drag and followed the predicted trajectory. This is first time that an IAD is designed specifically for spent stage recovery. All the objectives of the mission were successfully demonstrated
ISRO claims this design can not only facilitate the reuse of first stages, it can also be used for science payloads to Mars and Venus.
I look at this and wonder, wouldn’t parachutes or parasails, already developed and used numerous times in similar applications, do the same job? In fact, Rocket Lab has already successfully used parachutes to control the re-entry of its Electron first stages. Meanwhile, SpaceX uses simple and lightweight grid fins to control the descent of its Falcon 9 first stages, and simply fires that stage’s engines twice to slow it down for landing.
While there may be engineer advantages to this airbag design, the whole thing smacks of many of NASA’S complex test programs that never made it past prototype tests. The ideas always looked good, but they never were practical or cost effective.
Capitalism in space: The Indian rocket startup Skyroot has just raised $51 million in private investment capital for the development of its smallsat rocket, Vikram-1.
Operating as a private aerospace manufacturer and commercial launch service provider in the country, the Hyderabad-headquartered startup has been working on its flagship Vikram series of small-life launch vehicles. The first among them, the Vikram 1, is slated to take to the skies by the end of the year and launch small satellites to space.
The $51 million is the most any private aerospace commercial company from India has ever raised in a single funding round.
Though the Modi government has publicly encouraged the development of a private, independent, commercial aerospace industry, India’s bureaucracy has generally acted to block this effort. In 2019 it convinced the government to create New Space India Limited (NSIL), a wholly government-owned entity which is designed to retain as much control over commercial market share as possible. As recently as one month ago, the NSIL webpage described itself as aiming to “capture” that commercial market. That revealed its purpose too obviously, so the website was rewritten to now say its goal is to “spur” the Indian aerospace sector.
Because NSIL gets government money and has full control over all of India’s already developed government rockets and space facilities, it has an enormous advantage, which acts to discourage investment in new private companies such as Skyroot. This is a similar situation that existed in the U.S. for more than a half century following Apollo. NASA had the resources, controlled all launches, and thus made private investment for independent companies hard to obtain.
This only changed when NASA began awarding contracts to private companies in 2008, whereby the rockets and spacecraft produced were not owned or designed by NASA. And NASA was only forced to do so because Elon Musk happened to have enough of his own money to finance SpaceX himself.
When ISRO (India’s agency) or NSIL begin awarding contracts like this, then company’s like Skyroot will begin to blossom.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to place 51 more Starlink satellites into orbit, as well as a Sherpa orbital tug built by the commercial company Spaceflight.
The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The tug was successfully deployed and will carry a Boeing test satellite for a proposed 147 satellite constellation to its planned orbit.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
40 SpaceX
34 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 55 to 34 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 55 to 52. SpaceX’s 40 launches matches the U.S.’s entire total in 2020, and was only exceeded by the U.S. six times since the dawn of the space age in 1957.
NASA managers today decided they will not attempt another launch of SLS during the present launch window that closes on September 6, 2022, and will bring the rocket back to assembly building for more detailed trouble-shooting.
Engineers not only need to solve the hydrogen fuel leak in a fuel line connection that caused today’s launch scrub, they will also have to replace the flight termination batteries needed in case the rocket has to be destroyed during liftoff because it is flying out of control. These batteries only have a few weeks life, and the launch delays this week caused them to reach their limit.
The next launch windows are either from September 19 to October 4, excluding September 29-30, or October 17 to October 31, excluding October 24, 25, 26, and 28.
At that point SLS’s two solid rocket strap-on boosters will have been stacked for about two years, one full year past what NASA once considered their safe lifespan. The agency has waived that rule for SLS, but waiving it for more than a full year might simply be too risky. If the boosters need to be replaced, that will delay the launch by at least another three months, at the minimum.
Right now the odds remain high this launch will not occur in 2022.
A Starlink subscriber to the company’s RV option decided to try it on his sailing boat during a weeklong trip among the Greek islands, and found it worked surprisingly well.
They combined Starlink’s service with cellular connectivity and compared the two while using social media, Google maps, and video streaming. The outcome? Starlink and cellular complimented each other, according to Topolev.
Starlink suffered outages when it was surrounded by other boats’ masts or when the yacht made sharp turns, but worked well at sea, whereas cellular connectivity dropped out when the boat was far from the shore, Topolev said. “It was surprisingly good,” he said. “There were some outages and sometimes we had to manually reboot it … but basically it worked … almost all the time.”
The RV option is specifically for use in moving vehicles, though its use on a boat was not expected to be its prime target customers. Nonetheless, the test suggests strongly that Starlink will work quite well on the big cruise ships, one liner of which, Royal Caribbean, has already signed a deal to make Starlink operational by next year.
Click for interactive map
The Ingenuity engineering team today released the flight plan for the helicopter’s next flight on Mars, its thirty-first since arrival.
The flight is scheduled for no earlier than September 6, mid-day on Mars, and will travel about one minute to the west for a distance of about 319 feet. The white dot on the overview map to the right shows the approximate landing spot, with the green dot marking Ingenuity’s present position. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position as it moves to the south and west after leaving the first delta cliff face it studied during the past few months.
The flight’s main goal is to reposition the helicopter to keep it close to the rover to facilitate communications. However, the engineering team has also now adjusted its goals to also practice hitting very precise landing spots. This goal is to develop the engineering and software that can be used on the helicopter that is not yet built that NASA and ESA intend to use to recover Perseverance’s core samples for return to Earth. That helicopter will not only have to very precisely land right next to those samples in a position allowing it to grab them, it must also land very precisely next to the sample return spacecraft to deposit them within it.
China today successfully used its Long March 4C rocket to place a military Earth observation satellite into orbit.
Launched from an interior spaceport, the rocket’s lower stages thus crashed uncontrolled in China.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
39 SpaceX
34 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 54 to 34 in the national rankings, and the entire globe 54 to 52.
